Survey: Americans Spend $800 Per Year On Unwanted Travel

How many trips do you take each year that you really didn’t want to take in the first place? It could be anything from your brother’s destination wedding on a tropical island to your friend’s kid’s graduation party a few suburbs over. What these trips have in common is that you didn’t pick the date or venue and are going because you feel you have to. Hotwire.com has coined a word for these trips: obli-cations.

Get it? Like a staycation, but with the concept of “obligation” smushed in there. Using an utterly unscientific survey of 2,000 adults, the company determined that American consumers spend about $185 billion per year on trips that they take only out of a sense of obligation.

The good news, of course, is that there are ways to save money on travel even when you really, really don’t want to be traveling in the first place. Marketwatch points out one trick that comes in handy when shopping online, especially for flights: if you’ve been researching different airlines and travel sites, clear your browser’s cache or use a different computer to order, since the mere act of looking up flights and then later returning to the site may get you higher prices than a fresh first-time visitor.